Rights and lives of EU citizens, particularly Bulgarians and Romanians, should not be used as bargaining chips in the forthcomign EU-UK negotiations, PES head and Bulgarian ex-Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev has said.

Meeting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn after a Party of European Socialists (PES) forum in Paris, he has warned that the Tories are heading down the same path as UKIP in the weeks after a majority of Britons voted to leave the EU.

The British Parliament earlier this week failed to back a document, proposed by Labour, calling for guarantees that EU nationals living in the UK will remain even after Britain is out of the bloc. Additionally, Bulgarians, Romanians and other Eastern Europeans were targeted by a campaign led by UKIP and its ex-leader Nigel Farage over the past years.

"We saw where political games lead when lives of people are put at stake... If Britons really want to do the best for both their citizens living in the EU and the EU citizens living in [the UK], they should guarantee the right of all of them to stay," the Bulgarian Socialist Party's press office quotes him as saying.

More than a million Britons live in other EU member states, while more than three million of their nationals are based in the UK.

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